Love the Process

By  Engr. Carlos V. Cornejo

Seth Godin, a best-selling author of a number of self-improvement books, came up with a latest book on how to enhance our creativity entitled “The Practice: Shipping Creative Work”.   Seth Godin defines creativity as “the generous act of making things better by doing something that might not work.”  A doctor who sees a patient and is trying to heal his or her patient although it might not work is doing creative and generous work.  A leader who tries to lead others with his or her cause is doing creative work because he or she wants to improve the world, but his cause might or might not succeed.  Creativity in other words requires courage.   But with courage also comes the satisfaction of trying things out rather than not trying at all that guarantees one hundred per cent failure and at the same time it guarantees a life of mediocrity and boredom.

Seth Godin includes the virtue of generosity in his definition of creativity because there are people who are creative but doing illegal or selfish acts.  They are the people who are not after of making the world better but on the contrary destroying it such as a drug lord trying to come up with better and creative ways to sell his goods that will not be detected by the authorities.  Seth Godin calls these people as “hustlers” and the good guy as the “generous creative”.

Your creative practice might involve writing, programming, drawing, recording podcasts, coaching others, or cooking. Regardless of what you do during your practice, the goal is universal – stop focusing on results and learn to love the process. The more you embrace the process, the more you will trust yourself to take small risks and produce creative work.  The author illustrates the importance of focusing on the process through the pastime activity of fishing.  When Seth Godin was trying to learn fly fishing through a coach, he asked the coach not to put a bait on his hook because he wanted to focus on the skills of fishing.  His friends who were trying to learn along with him, however, were so intent on getting a fish to bite their hooks that they focused on willing, hoping and imploring but end up not getting any fish.  Because Seth’s goal was not to catch a fish yet, his detachment from the result, made him focus on the rhythm, posture and casting of the rod and beat his friends later on in getting a catch.

The author says, “Focus on the practice not the output because the practice is all we can control not the output.”  It’s much like giving it your best in any activity, and you don’t know the outcome, but the important thing is that you are giving it your all because that is the only thing you can control and something that will not give you regrets later on.  In creative work, the practice is what will put your creativity to the next level.  But you might ask, “If I don’t focus on results, how will I know I’m improving?  Seth advises two metrics:  how big is my discard pile?  And how much work have I shipped?

The discard pile is all about trial and error.  Drew Dernavich is a famous cartoonist of New Yorker, a world-wide read humor magazine.  Many consider him a genius with his cartoons but when he revealed to the public the number of rejected cartoons he had in a month, compared to the ones that get published, it was a shocking revelation, the ratio was 10 to 1.  Only one out of his ten submissions made it to the magazine.  This illustrates that even professional generous creatives still go through repetitive practice and mistakes.  The lesson here is that your “success” file will only grow in proportion to your “discard” file.  More success comes from more errors.  In other words, it’s the good old-fashioned “try and try until you succeed”.  Your discard pile might be lines of programming code that didn’t work as expected, product ideas that failed to be profitable, jokes no one laughed at, graphic designs no one shared on social media, or persuasive speeches that failed to move people.

Shipped work on the other hand is about making a commitment to stick to a schedule in shipping or sending your creative work to someone or to some people regardless of how you feel.  There will be days you don’t feel like shipping or don’t believe you can send a good work. However, after you make shipping on a recurring schedule an unemotional rule, you’ll magically find the creative energy you need to ship good work.  Every ship date is a chance to improve upon your last work. By improving on your prior work, you naturally build skill and refine your taste.  Start shipping to a few people such as relatives or friends.  Then try to get their feedback.  Over time, with more skill and better taste, you will find the courage to ship to more and more people.  By learning to love the process, increasing your discard pile, and shipping more often, you are well on your way to producing better original work and become an established generous creative.